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Fitting your Customer’s Brand
I’m a little late on this one, by now the furore over the 2012 (Terribly awful) Olympic games logo has died down… However, I’m far more interested in the backlash than the logo itself and what this means for branding, who ‘owns’ it and who controls it.
How did they get it so wrong?
Seriously. How could a branding company that charged over $NZ1 million for the logo be so far off? Any non-expert, average Joe outsider can look at the thing and IMMEDIATELY see that it in no way:
- Reflects London
- Reflects the Olympic games
The logo is virtually unreadable and looks like it belongs in the 80′s, The website looks like something a kid created. It’s like the branding company was so arrogant, they put five minutes into the job on the basis that their name alone would make anything fly. It appears these guys were relying on their ‘expert’ status to reenact the fairy story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Clearly, they hoped people would believe their ears and not their eyes and change their perception of ‘Brand London’ to
their own half-hearted effort.
But they failed dismally
The Backlash Begins
This is an interesting case where taxpayer money went into the brand while taxpayers were also the main consumers of it – these people truly owned the brand in every way… And they were quick to make their unhappiness known with:
- Almost 50,000 signatures on a petition to change the London 2012 logo
- Heaps of Londoners submitting their own logos for consideration (some of which are actually quite good)
- The London Mayor saying he ‘wouldn’t pay them a penny’
What Does this Mean for Branding?
The big brands of the past (the Cokes, Nikes, Mc Donalds and co) who define a brand and then get consumers to ADOPT it are becoming a thing of the past. Consumers these days are so aware of branding that we have developed our own personal brands. Instead of adopting the persona of a company’s brand, we expect their brand to match our own, or else they don’t get our business.
Lessons from London 2012
- Don’t be a ‘branding expert’ – The days of justifying branding disasters by explaining the ‘creative process’ behind them are over. No one cares about the ‘creative process’ and when you have to fall back on it because the end result is so shoddy, consumers just think you’re a loser.
- Don’t charge an absolute fortune for a logo, simply because you can… Pricing should be based on he difficulty and accuracy of portraying the brand, not the size of the organization commissioning it.
- Don’t think your logo design will be any better than a monkey’s just because you have a branding company.
- Don’t force your consumers to adopt your brand. Instead, adopt theirs.
The biggest disaster in the London 2012 logo disaster was not that the logo was exceptionally ugly, or that it caused epileptic fits… It was that the branding company tried to tell London citizens who they were and what their city was instead of asking them.
Hello, my name is Natalie, I have a business called 
June 17th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Nice breakdown Nat, although I think you missed an important point, the issue in my mind is not the spend or the result, its the expectation that a logo will have some influence over the way people interpret the event.
A logo is not a brand, the Olympics already has a logo, one that conveys the Olympic ideals really well, its simple, it has history, it unifies the string of games and their ability to unite the attention of the world.
The brand of a indivdual games is the experience that visitors and viewers from around the world are part of. Its the rocketman at the opening ceremony in LA, its the open air pool in Athens, its the ‘friendly games’ in Sydney. That is the tangible brand of a games, and that is why you probably can’t draw the logo of any games in history, without a google image search to jog your memory.
Also, I think its easy to point at large brands and say they are imposing their values on customers, but you have to remember, when Ray Kroc had only one McDonalds, the golden arches were over the door, and their brand has been consistency of experience and food. Coke has managed to put an indistinguishable product all over the world. Nike focussed on a very small core audience for much of their early life, constructing great shoes for runners that cushioned their audience and lived up to expectation. These guys now use psychology of colouring, their size as advantage for manufacturing and distribution, their huge revenues to grab attention but they got there by meeting and exceeding expectation.
While they might be making America obese or ‘unfairly aspirated’ in their desire for new nikes, they might be buying their way into new underdeveloped markets but thats because they have been productized and are dying as brands, albeit very slowly.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
True, I used the terms interchangeably here because the logo and website seem to sum up an overall bad brand!
As far as large companies imposing their brands goes, this is not really the large brand’s fault as much as a sign of the times they operated in – all these brands are now fighting to make their brands a lot more ‘interactive’, whereas a while ago we LOVED it how they defined us.
This could turn out to be the most interesting Olympics yet as the focus is now very much on ALL of London defining their brand… And they have years to pull it off!
Thanks for the comment, very insightful :)
June 18th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Everybody seems to have forgotten the logo they used during the bid:
http://www.creativematch.co.uk/viewnews/?88854
I thought that was pretty clever. It uses the five colours from the Olympic rings to trace out the shape of the River Thames.
Those colours are also quite similar to the colours used on the tube map, which could have easily been incorporated into a logo design.
Such a missed opportunity …
June 18th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
I also liked the one in the Newspaper that turned the red Olympic ring into the underground sign.
Yeah, from everyone’s accounts their winning bid should have been the one they used. It is a shame huh?